Saturday, 29 July 2017

Schroom

It’s been a
while, I know. Lent, Easter, and the Ordination all conspired to keep me from
posting; or perhaps it is my fault. In any case I was very glad to see how many
people sacrificed time to come to the Ordination. I was particularly touched by
the presence of some American friends; Youth Choir Faith, which sang a few
hymns at the Mass; and one or two special friends.

Since then I
have been on holiday, another mountain-hiking holiday in Austria. We stayed for
two nights at a convent of the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross (O.R.C.) and
then continued to a small hotel, more of a guesthouse really, between
Ochsengarten and Kühtai. The guesthouse had its own chapel. It was beautiful.

Last night I
was procrastinating. (Are there job offers for procrastination? If it were my
job I would probably delay procrastinating until the last possible moment, and
before that moment I would get so much useful things done!) I opened a magazine
that was lying on the table and found an article by Kees Waaijman, a well-known
Dutch Scripture scholar of the Carmelite order, about schroom – a typically Dutch word connoting a kind of fear that is
more like a reverent hesitation.

The article contained
the following quotation from John Cassian (my translation):

Schroom is filled with attentive affection, not
afraid of blows nor of reproaches, but only of the slightest injury to love,
and it is haunted by a passionate tenderness that saturates all its acting and
speaking, out of concern that the other’s burning love towards it might cool,
however little.

It reminded me
of a favourite phrase of Pope Francis, la
rivoluzione della tenerezza, the ‘revolution of tenderness’. Tenderness is
a word that occurs multiple times in his inaugural homily; there it is
associated with the attitude of St. Joseph. I sensed the revolution in this
quote by the desert father.

I also sensed
it in Austria – and here I was reminded of a quote from Charles Williams,
somewhere in his mysterious Arthuriad cycle: a description of an island never
set foot on, the land of the Trinity: ‘each
in turn the Holder and the Held’.

This I
remembered, and after a while it continues:

…in the land of the Trinity, the land of the
perichoresis,

of separateness without separation, reality
without rift,

where the Basis is in the Image, and the Image
in the Gift…

I had to look
for it, and lo and behold, it was from The
Founding of the Company. On rereading I found that this poem is also the
one that contains the exchange between the poet Taliessin and the court fool
Dinadan. Dinadan calls Taliessin ‘lieutenant of God’s new grace’. Taliessin
refuses a title that would make him master over others, but Dinadan lectures
him:

1 comment:

I was wondering where the line on your Facebook "summary" thing came from, but I wasn't expecting to see my question answered so promptly! I am glad that you made the time to write, even if it came upon much procrastination :)